the eric update – day 30: first bath from mama!

when you’re in the nicu for you spend a lot of time wondering when you’ll get the chance to do the simple things that other parents take for granted. for 30 days we’ve pondered, contemplated and bet when eric would be stable enough for a bath from mama.

and woohoooo! late in the night we were pleasantly surprised to find that we could give eric his first bath! i think both of us felt a mix of complete elation along with a good dose of pensiveness that he might stop breathing or his heart rate would dip.

he’s been getting “spit baths” all along, but surely none of them were as fun as the one he got from mama. most of the hands you see belong to kris, but every so often nurse sue lends a helping hand. i, of course, am darting in and out, trying to capture the entire thing.

micropreems don’t usually like baths very much; from their perspective it’s just something that makes them very cold and all the touching can lead to overstimulation tantrums. but i guess eric isn’t like most micropreems, since he was quite content through most of the process

first things first – you must start by wiping the crud from his eyes.

and a little more scrubbing. nurse sue is holding his head and kris provides the other two hands.

more scrubbing.

the ears must be cleaned.

scrubbing bubbles. kris applies soap to his very sensitive skin.

help!! eric is pleading for me to intervene.

kris is picking eric up in an attempt to get his head closer to the water.

kris is gently applying some water to eric IV’s head right before she adds some shampoo.

Conflux :: A Confluence of Curiousness

i’m not sure how to square these findings with the fact that i’ve long said that in a parallel universe very close to our own i live alone in cabin in the middle of nowhere writing manifestos: “The effect of population density on life satisfaction was therefore more than twice as large for low-IQ individuals than for high-IQ individuals,” they found. And “more intelligent individuals were actually less satisfied with life if they socialized with their friends more frequently.”

the heart warming fable of thanksgiving, unsurprisingly, ends up being a whole lot more complicated than some of us were taught and answers the nagging question of how squanto spoke perfect english when the pilgrims arrived and what was happening during the 100 year interim between columbus and the pilgrims ( spoiler: it involves human trafficking, enslavement and villages being wiped out ). and if you’re a stickler for tradition, you should put ditch the turkey and cranberry sauce for salted pork and olives since the spanyiards were the first to celebrate thanksgiving 50 years before the pilgrims.

“…researchers from a Bosch startup called Deepfield Robotics presented a paper on “Vision-Based High-Speed Manipulation for Robotic Ultra-Precise Weed Control,” which has like four distinct exciting-sounding phrases in it.”IEEE Spectrum

after updating to iOS 9 and el capitan i’ve been having troubles synching photos from my iphone to my macbook air. the mac would recognize the iphone but no photos would show up in the photos application or image capture. it was driving me nuts. turns out, if you have non-apple services like dropbox running that sync your photos to non-icloud services you have to turn them off.

having run a half a dozen marathons, i can’t imagine finishing in 3:05. even more unimaginable in full amish garb so kudos to leroy stolzfus. the whole article is great read but now i want to know more of the backstory on why he started to run: “A few years ago, Stolzfus got “involved with some stuff” he said he shouldn’t have. His brother-in-law suggested he start running instead when he was tempted. He took the suggestion to heart, and went out for a run.”

huh, who knew edward tufte has a farm with 234-acres of landscape sculpture fields that he opens to the public once a year. i’d love to make a trip. and i also love the article’s description of tufte, “[he] is also known as a genius of data visualization, professor emeritus of political science, statistics, and computer science at Yale, an author of books on information design, and a hater of PowerPoint.

“The Chagossian people have a word, in their Creole language, for heartbreak: sagren. It is a profound sorrow which refers to the loss of a home, and the impossibility of returning to it. As we build new worlds with our technologies, knitted from fiber-optic light and lines of code, it is incumbent on us to ensure it does not reproduce the erasures and abuses of the old, but properly accounts for the rights and liberties of every one of us.”citizen-ex